I sin samling bilder på Flickr har Kungl. biblioteket lagt upp några av August Strindbergs “celestografier” – bilder på himlen, tagna men en linslös kamera – från slutet av 1800-talet. Här är lite från en essä om dessa bilder av Douglas Feuk från Cabinet Magazine:
The greatness of Strindberg’s photographs lies precisely in that they offer this double view, where starry sky and earthly matter seem to move within and through one another.
Today, science believes that this is actually so. All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are created in nuclear reactions inside stars and then thrown out into space, especially in the gigantic eruptions of supernovas. Almost every atom that makes up our material world of stones, plants, and human beings must once have been inside of exploding giant stars. This would mean, in a dizzyingly material sense, that we are actually made out of stardust. But more symbolically, the celestographs also seem to meditate on the links between the dark earth and the celestial light and life force. I understand them as a reverie on correspondences between micro- and macrocosmos—or between light and dark, high and low, gold and dirt.